Birds, Bees, and Bad Girls
by kokopelle
Summary: Quatre reveals to Dorothy how Heero gave him the "speech." Latest 4xD installment to the ficlet series "Love and Other Explosive Items", sequel to "The Shippables."


**Disclaimer:** Gundam Wing and all its characters © Sotsu Agency, Sunrise, and TV Asahi. All fanfics are not for profit.

**A/N:** Here's my _Love and Other Explosive Items_ installment for the week, a sequel to "The Shippables". See my profile/story page for the links of other stories in this ficlet series. Enjoy! :)

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**Birds, Bees, and Bad Girls**  
by kokopelle

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The night was not supposed to go like this.

Sure, Dorothy was draped on his bed, propping her head up with her right hand and lovingly caressing his violin with the other. That was about a quarter of his goal. He wanted this night—which marked the fourth year since they started dating—to be extra-sappy and sweet. Just full of soft, gentle love. She could throw all the silly barbs she could cook up and mock-gag all she wanted, but that was how he wished the night to be. Then again, when did everything go right with this woman? She never sticks to the plan.

There she was, a beautiful image he wanted to keep in his head… except that this image would always come with the irksome sound bites she was making now. If he was going to be honest, he would rather have the image discarded altogether.

"Tell me," she prodded, batting her eyelashes at him.

Quatre rubbed at his eyes. Facing Dorothy, he leaned his temple against the headboard and sighed. "Why does every conversation with you always leads into something like this?"

"We're getting married," she said, as if he needed reminding. "If you still have a hard time opening up to me about things like this, maybe we should take a step back and think hard about it some more."

He rolled his eyes, hearing the feigned hurt in it that she always uses on him. He asked, "What exactly do you want me to say?"

"The whole story."

He heaved a deeper sigh. "Why should 'Heero gave me the speech' not be enough?"

"Because it isn't!" She scooted closer and pillowed her head on his lap, giggling. "I want to hear everything. Five W's and H. Don't spare the details."

He groaned.

"Please?"

This was all his fault. It would not lead into this if he had not let his hormones go haywire for a moment. It would not lead into this if he had finished playing the violin. But he halted for a millisecond to catch a glimpse of her reaction, and he found her so tempting, a silent siren who was wonderingly eyeing the way he was coaxing out his love song from the strings. So he lunged, and they kissed and panted and kissed again, and they were tangling and disentangling from each other to figure out the mechanics of their clothes, and when he caught his breath he said the dumbest thing that could ever come out of his mouth: _"I don't know a lot about this, just the things Heero told me about…"_

There were only a handful of moments in his post-Eve War life that called for a self-destruct button. This was one of them.

"Quatre?"

He looked at her in response, a desperate prayer written all over his face. She could read it all right, but her smirk was saying she was not letting him go without the whole the bird and the bees account. She raised her head a little and nuzzled him to emphasize that.

"Why me?"

"Would you rather I ask Heero about it?"

He shot her a look.

"So tell me."

He should keep a tally of how many sighs he would permit himself that night. "Fine."

"Good boy." She levered herself up again to a sitting position—which he was thankful for, because even though the mood was more than half-ruined by now, he would not wish for her head anywhere near Downstairs while he unfolded this story. Her reaction annoyed him, though; she looked as if she could use a tub of buttered popcorn.

"It happened around when we enrolled in Miss Relena's Sanc Kingdom School of Pacifism during the war," he said for a start, which made one of her eyebrows raise. "I never told Heero, but you're a big part of it."

"Really? How?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "It just happened. Perhaps it's my payback for spending too much time around mobile suits at the peak of my puberty and then suddenly being chucked into a place full of girls." He shrugged and waved it away. "So, remember when you challenged Heero to a fencing match?"

"How could I forget?" Dorothy said with a wink. "It was wild. For all the training he underwent, I'm quite sure I'm one of the very few people that got to him like that. Have I ever mentioned I had a big crush on him?"

"About a hundred times," Quatre mumbled.

"Oh don't be jealous. It's not his fault he's a lot hotter than you when you were fifteen."

"_Thank you_. Now do you want to hear the rest, or do we list the reasons why you should have proposed to Heero instead? I can go with the latter too, you know…"

Dorothy laughed and tried to give him a kiss, but he squirmed out of the way.

"Where was I?" he said, ignoring Dorothy's half-hearted protests.

"Fencing match," she relented.

"Right. So you had this _wild_ fencing match as you call it and…I don't know, I couldn't keep it out of my head. The way you fought, perhaps. My experience with real hand-to-hand combat started right after I met the Maguanacs, and I had never gone against a woman that time. Up until then I've never realized it could be so…elegant? It's not the right term, but it's the first that came to mind. It's majestic like a waltz, but fiercer and more dangerous because you could get hurt. I don't want to like it, but I do."

Dorothy took this in with a thoughtful expression on her face. "Your version of the 'beauty of battles'?"

Quatre took no notice of that, expecting the reaction. "It didn't stay long with me though. I had my plate full at that time: I thought a lot about my father, I had this anxious need to find Trowa, and I've saddled myself with this new responsibility of protecting Miss Relena _and_ trying to convince Heero not to leave. I was a stew of emotions. I thought my mind couldn't provide enough room for something else. I was wrong."

"Meaning?"

Quatre shifted uncomfortably on the sheets. "With all the grief and pressure, perhaps I did look worse than I felt. Bad enough for Heero to suggest I hit the sack even for a few hours. I did, and that's where you came into the picture."

She waited with a raised forked eyebrow.

"I dreamed about you," he confessed in an undertone.

Judging by her expectant reaction, she was not getting it.

"I dreamed _that dream_ about you," he tried.

And then it clicked. Her eyes widened for a bit, and then she lost it. She struggled to make a coherent sentence out of the string of giggles, but she was merely shaking with the effort. Quatre rubbed the back of his head, feeling the heat spread to his cheeks and neck. Whether it was because of annoyance or embarrassment, he was not so sure.

"I'm guessing it had a lot to do with your fencing match with Heero, because in my dream—"

"Good ol' Freud, was it a threesome?"

"—in my dream you were still wearing the white uniform." He threw her a warning look. "Well, at least you were wearing them before, you know, you took it off."

"Fencing uniform, huh? A little kinky if you ask me. Care to share more details?"

He went on ignoring her, feeling the blood boil beneath his skin. "The thing is, we—_I_—never got to finish. Heero shook me awake, thinking I was having a nightmare. Or so he said. When he asked if I was all right, there's a hint of something in his eyes that I'd never seen before. Especially when he said I was making noises. I didn't dare ask what kind of noises; I didn't need to."

Quatre stopped and started to worry because Dorothy looked as if she was struggling for air, but he relaxed when he realized she was just trying to control her laughter. "I think it would be fun to get Heero's side of the story," she managed.

"Like I said, I didn't get to finish the dream," he said, waving her off. "I'm like halfway there, so you can imagine my… _situation_. That was the only time Heero got so inquisitive around me. He repeatedly asked me questions, if I'm okay, if I can stand up, _if I want a cold shower_… Heero knew, Dorothy. He knew. What choice do I have? I didn't know what to do, so I told him. I told him I was having a wet dream."

"Oh, I would give everything to be just in that moment!" she got out between chuckles. "It's got to be priceless. You basically told Heero Yuy you had a b—"

"Yes," he admitted, feeling as if he would burst with the shame of just reliving the memory. "I was in the shower when he started talking. I didn't spend enough time with my father for him to give me the talk; I picked up a few points from biology books, but it was from Heero's speech that I learned a lot. I don't know who gave him the lessons. I don't care. All I know was I kept everything he said in mind—even if it scarred everything in my cranium—and we never mentioned it ever again."

When Dorothy's chortles began to subside a little, she slid her arms around Quatre's neck and pressed her lips to his temple down to his cheek.

"Hey, it didn't mean I began liking you as early as 195," Quatre defended unconvincingly, a spark of teasing in his eyes. "In my remaining time at the School I blushed when you got mentioned or when I would see you, but the fifteen-year-old me still thought you were a shady, bad, manipulative fifteen-year-old girl."

"Yes, consciously," Dorothy threw back. "Deep inside, maybe the shady, bad, manipulative girls turn you on. The subconscious mind can't lie."

"Whatever," he breathed onto her neck, not bothering to come up with a better rejoinder. He glued his lips to hers, thinking it was not so bad to not to stick to the plan after all.


End file.
